“Dace, would you please tell me what’s going on before my feet fall off?”
Yuyu continues not to accept that they’re in danger because he’s such a sue he knows he’ll be fine.
Dace, amazingly, doesn’t take this as evidence that fuck it, he should just abandon this idiot but explains they’re running from brain eating chaos fairies, despite being a pair of combat class exalted, because Exalted is supposed to be the game of everyone being more badass than you. Next, he explains the brain eating chaos fairies are brain-eating, because Yuyu knows jack and shit about his own world.
The Fair Folk aren’t into just killing their enemies, not in the same way people are. They’re after dreams, Yushuv, dreams and things like them. So they’d rather push us and harry us, make us jump at shadows and go half-mad with fear. They’ll come for us only when we’re ready to drop, exhausted from chasing phantoms. It’ll make the dreams taste better, or so I’m told.”
This is the sort of thing that’s in every child’s tale in this universe, for the obvious reason that this kind of info is sort of vital to knowing to avoid them as much as possible.
Yuyu suggests counterplan: be so cool we don’t feel fear, no biggie.
Dace says that’s stupid and he’s stupid for saying it, because if they’re not having fun they just skip to the killing.
Dace struggled visibly to resist the temptation to hack his way through the obstinate vegetation, and on me occasion it had taken a pointed reminder from Yushuv that they were trying to leave as few signs of their passage as possible to prevent him from doing so.
1) Having just established that they have no chance of losing the fae, there’s no point in trying to make their trail hard to follow. The only thing that matters is speed.
2) Even if there was some reason this was a good idea, which there is not, why the fuck would Yuyu be the voice of reason here?
Also, there are some giant bright spiders they’re avoiding, probably because their venom makes you melt or something.
Yuyu says he’s tired, so Dace helpfully exposits that essence can be used to sustain yourself instead of rest. He does so, just in time for the surprise attack. It’s wolf spiders, who are gianter giant spiders.
Nervous now, he scanned the woods again, then began looking up in the trees. Surely spiders that large couldn’t climb
That’s stupid and you’re stupid for thinking it.
I do know that wolf spiders like to eat anything else that moves, but at least they’re not poisonous. Not so far as anyone’s reported, anyway. The pack we’ve got in front of us is big enough to be dangerous, but not overwhelming. We could probably charge right in and take them.”
This I can’t really lay at the book’s feet, when it’s so rare for anything to get right, but, the default state of nature is less red in tooth and claw and more cautious avoidance. If the humans look at a situation as being a mild risk and a likely victory, why the hell are the wolf spiders sticking around at those odds? I realize this destroys the whole rpg ecosystem of level-appropriate threats, but it’s not like Exalted uses CR or gives XP for killing things.
“Monsters” should just be a dumber version of sapient opponents, just willing to retreat if the fight looks like more trouble than it’s worth. If a monster persists when outmatched, it should either be some magical abomination that didn’t evolve and doesn’t reproduce or there should be an extra reason why – for example, being unable to retreat because they’re boxed in or because they have young who can’t flee with them, both of which are likely occurrences when dealing with dens.
Dace explains that going around is impossible because everywhere else is full of web traps, because the DM is really set on this fight and if that means saying wolf spiders naturally trap every inch of the forest but their home base, so be it. Yuyu suggests just burning the webs then, and the DM says try it and the whole forest will go up in every direction but the brain eating chaos fairies chasing you.
“But the forest is green! It won’t burn.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”
Yuyu knows when he’s beat and doesn’t try to suggest that if the forest is that flammable, maybe they could try getting the fire behind them and burning the brain eating chaos fairies, or at least getting rid of cover used to snipe at them from. He accepts the railroad. The DM responds by taunting him: okay, so how are you going to do it? Seems Dace figures that just because they’re frantically fleeing for their lives doesn’t mean he can’t spend some time asking Yuyu to tell him what he thinks is the best idea. I mean, there’s no rush.
Yuyu’s brilliant plan is shoot some wolf spiders to get them to come to them, because obviously when you’re trying to punch through an area, you should destroy the element of surprise first. Dace coos over how smart Yuyu is, only to find Yuyu asking how many of his opponents should he shoot at in the coming fight to the death. All of them, says Dace. Obviously.
Anyway, so he shoots three wolf spiders who are just hanging out in their den. Then he really settles in to slaughter them.
Yushuv could feel those swirling motes of energy flowing through his arms and into his bow. He nocked, sighted, drew and shot, again and again without pause. He was an automaton, the perfect mechanical archer, and all enemies in his sight died. Some took shelter behind the corpses of their comrades, but his arrows arched high and found them. Others fled, but not as fast as an arrow could fly.
Note none of them attempted to attack him. None came to them. They cowered or fled, and Yuyu shot them anyway, because he’s pretty sure the XP is handed out by the body or at least they’ll be good spell components to sell in town, and morals are nothing compared to XP and loot.
There are ways to justify this sort of thing, like talking about the human bones they see in the spider’s webs. But they don’t bother here. There’s no sign these guys have been preying on humans and honestly, not all large predators pick us as the best meal. For all we know they’re keeping down some other nasty.
After an unknown number of deaths, the wolf spiders finally charge them, proving my point about how if outmatched animals are attacking you anyway, it’s because you’ve fucked up in forcing them to have no other options. Cowering did nothing. Running did nothing. What’s left to try is a suicide charge, so that’s what they do.
His daiklave held high, he put one foot atop the piled packs and bellowed a challenge.
The wolf spiders took it. The first leapt at his throat even as the second hurled itself at the tempting target of his foot. Laughing, Dace stepped back and kicked the packs forward, catching the second spider in mid-leap and throwing it back. His daiklave came out in a broad, flat arc that intersected the wolf spider’s leap, slicing through its front legs and shearing off half of its head. It spun to the left and crashed into the bushes, ruined head gushing ichor and legs thrashing wildly.
Because if they didn’t force the wolf spiders to attack, how could they enjoy a cathartic beatdown?
Dace turns out to be overconfident as the wolf spider pack takes advantage of the rules favoring groups. One nearly bites Dace’s throat out, but he slowly batters its head in. It’s sort of like that scene in Naruto during exams when Sakura tries to take on the enemy group singlehandedly. It’s really hard not to view the spider as the underdog here.
Shaking his hand in attempt to cleanse it of excessive vitreous humor, Dace looked around for more opponents and found none. He did, however, see Yushuv sitting in the path next to a dead wolf spider, his dagger buried neatly in the center of its head. The boy looked up. “I thought you were having too much fun to interfere.”
Ah, the fatal flaw of solars in these books: when you’re all evil, it’s hard to work together.
Yuyu says that while the wolf spiders are probably all dead now, but the fight was so loud that if the Fair Folk had lost our trail, they’ve found it again.” even though it was made clear originally there was no chance they’d lose it. Also, in that case you guys probably shouldn’t have done the whole mass murder thing.
That had been entirely too close. He had been showing off for Yushuv and it had nearly cost him.
Yuyu’s sue powers are so amazing other characters nearly get killed trying to impress him.
Next chapter, Holok the lame.
“I don’t do priests, not even for sticky buns.”
I’m not sure if we’re supposed to get victim-blamey with this, but his description of the girl is there was a coldness in her eyes that he found disturbing in a child. as if the problem is he finds it gross, not how horrible her life must be if she’s developed rules for who she fucks for food.
He knew of those in the Empire-and even a few of his peers-who indulged in such things, but the thought never held the slightest appeal for him. He’d been born on a farm, fourteen centuries ago, and in some ways he was still a farmer’s son at heart.
City folk are perverse childfuckers, farmers are morally upstanding.
This is particularly stupid given sids are the bureaucracy exalt and all live together in a giant continent-spanning city.
Anyway, Holok, fourteen centuries old, exalted to the caste best able to find information and track people, has decided his brilliant plan to find the boy is ask this girl about why kids run away from home.
“Everyone runs away from home for a different reason.
You’d think someone whose whole thing is about manipulating people with butterfly effects would know this!
Asking me why I did isn’t going to help you find him. I don’t think he would have run away for the reasons I did, anyway.”
Even in a setting that has bisexual and gay people everywhere, sexual abuse is something that only happens to girls.
Holok continues to get the vapors at all this and is just glad she didn’t give the details, because even consideration for other people is really all about him. He’s guilted into giving her a whole jade sliver, which won’t even be worth that much because if she tries to break it into usable coin she’ll either get it stolen outright or cheated of most of the value. Now she’ll probably end up dead in an alley. Good going, Holok.
She advises him that if the kid’s around, check the Guild because they enslave kids to sell to the brain eating chaos fairies.
Holok sulks because the Guild and the Immaculates don’t get along, and the Guild’s only god is how much you can pay and the scraps of jade in his purse wouldn’t buy him an hour with a dockside whore because apparently dockside whores are some very pricey ladies.
let alone a valuable slave whom the Fair Folk would no doubt pay a pretty penny for.
Wait, you think he’s actually there?
What the hell book. Even for you this is idiotic.
He has no idea where the kid is. He does know the kid is a solar and specifically a solar that wiped out a brotherhood + sidereal. Why the fuck would the kid happen to be enslaved by the Guild right here?
I thought you wanted to talk because you thought they might have run across the kid and remembered him, but no, you’re fucking insane!
Anyway, Holok thinks he needs money and to figure out how to attach himself to a Guild caravan without either getting his throat slit or wreaking havoc on innumerable Guildsmen who allowed their dislike of Immaculates to get the better of their common sense. If only he had some sort of power to allow him to take on different roles and be believed in it! If only that was in fact one of his core abilities!
Did I mention most people can’t even remember meeting him? Kind of makes your murder plans hard to plan.
Holok then says that the real reason they hate each other is that the Guild was made by opposing exalts, because nothing happens in Creation without exalts doing it. Interestingly, the argument the Guild must be an exalt’s protect/it’s unrealistic it isn’t owned by an exalt was really persistent in the fan community and it’s funny to see it appearing as fact all the way back here. There was even a whole book about the Guild that was pretty much hundreds of pages of NO LET ME TELL YOU HOW EVERY LAST INCH OF THE GUILD IS DESIGNED TO REPEL EXALTED INFLUENCE because the idea was so persistent (it ended up pretty ridiculous in its own way because there’s no reason why a a bunch of mortal merchants would’ve designed their trading caravans to function like terrorist cells, if terrorists lived in a world with mind-controlling supermen and had access to OOC documents listing exactly how their powers worked and how to handle them).
But there’s more to hate about this, because not only is the Guild the product of exalted hands, but specifically it’s the Gold faction sids, because lunars are kind of like mortals in that they also can’t accomplish anything.
It was a point of some pride to the elders of the Bronze faction that the Immaculate monks usually came out on top in these little brawls
This is also really pathetic given the Bronze represent almost all sidereals, and also all Gold “elders” date from after the usurpation due to the Bronze murdering them to the last. So they’re vastly outnumbered and made up exclusively of younger exalts, and the best Bronze can do against their forces is “usually come out on top”? God, you guys suck.
Finally, he points out that this is all stupid because The odds of them having the boy were, after all, slim. Right! So you’re going to On the other hand, he had few other leads. Traveling to where he’d been stabbed by the young Anathema would do no good; it had been weeks since they’d fought. No doubt the boy was gone and the trail was destroyed, and he had little desire to go trudging back into that swamp for no reason.
…entire WEEKS have passed since a badly injured kid who didn’t know anything about hiding his trail staggered off. Why, the trail by this point might require a skilled mortal tracker to follow! Better not to bother with such a futile thing and chase geese instead.
While it’s hard to say what’s most ridiculous about this, the fact that the fight happened because the Wyld Hunt was chasing him, showing the Wyld Hunt regularly finds and hunts down quarry they haven’t even seen yet, is perhaps the most glaring. They’ve obviously entirely capable of doing this because we just saw them do it last book.
Beyond that, he had no idea at all where his quarry had gone, and as a result one direction was as good as another, really.
“I mean, sure he seemed to be sticking to the wild areas and I could try to at least focus on that, but on the other hand, if I stay in cities, I can get tea whenever I went, so they seem like equally valid choices.”
Why has no one killed you yet, Holok? Are you the living embodiment of sunk cost fallacy? Do they say stuff like that sure, killing you a hundred years ago and getting a hundred year old newbie would have obviously been preferable, and killing you a thousand years ago and gettin a thousand year old competent sid would’ve been so much better, but you’ve had fourteen hundred years to get less incompetent and surely it’ll start paying off any year now!
Well, Ketchup Carjack, the end is in sight! As the solars swarm the area and sidereals gets stretched too thin to handle it, you’ll be looking at situations where you could send either the guy who exalted yesterday or this idiot, and you’ll realize that the day old sidereal is already brighter and more valuable than this chucklefuck, and you’ll decide which one gets the job of “lure a circle of angry death exalts into Creation long enough for us to get a look at them” and which one gets “watch this other guy get shiskabobed from a distance and record his opponents’ abilities”.
Further proving my point, Holok says that Perhaps the Maidens were working through a slip of a girl to direct him this time. Can you imagine what his reports must look like? “And then I saw this hooker and I thought, the Maidens were working through her! I quickly intuited I needed to use My Penis to get the information we needed. And indeed, between her and My Penis I learned that the Guild was sending some of their high-class prostitutes to a big Dynist party. Clearly I needed to be there, so I started the requisite bribes (see attached expense report).”
But hookers are not the issue right now. He tries to ask the pious waitress, who thinks he’s hitting on her because the tea is apparently magic viagra, but he explains no, he just wants to know where the Guild is and where the dice are, which I imagine dismays her just as much as when she thought he was hitting on her. You could make it a little easier for people to believe in your made up religion, Holok.
…
Well! We’re now a third of the way through the book. Let’s check in on characters and their motivations.
Ratcatcher: planning to get revenge, I think. B+, points off for vagueness.
Wren: planning to escape the underworld. A++++ reasons.
Unforgiven Blossom: planning to go somewhere after stealing the knife for some reason. F–
Prince of Shadows: Incomplete.
Ketchup Carjack: worried about Wren’s disappearance and the kid who failed to kill Holok. D+, don’t you have bigger problems?
Yuyu: Training montage. C+, should really not need to learn half this stuff.
Dace: training him because a bird said so. D-
Holok: obeying Ketchup Carjack by sitting around drinking tea. C-